And the first thing I photoed yesterday was newspaper headlines, about Britain’s Envy-of-the-World NHS. Those first three were literally the first three snaps I took yesterday, and the last one was photoed later, at London Bridge Station, more about which later, I hope.

Read, and be amazed:

I honestly cannot remember a day when Britain’s NHS has ever, ever had a worse press than it had yesterday. (The same stories had been all over the telly on Wednesday evening also.)

I hope to write at greater length at Samizdata about these dramas, connecting it to my Alpha Graphs stuff, but promise nothing

The basic idea being that a nationalised industry collapses not when it merely starts deteriorating, but only when it is deteriorating so fast that a switch to the free market, although horrible, would be no worse even in the short run. And of course massively better in the long run. But it’s the short run that matters because it is during that short run that you or your elderly loved one dies, through being left out in a corridor or some such horror.

Libertarians are prone to assume that things like the NHS are untouchable, merely because people continue to swear by them when they are getting only somewhat worse. Brainwashed fools! They will never see sense! But they are seeing sense. And then suddenly, to the amazement of libertarians, they do suddenly see sense. Actually, just a bit more sense, along with the sense they had already been seeing.

See also: collapse of the USSR.

The NHS has a bit of a way to go before it folds, because people are still at the stage, as you can tell from these headlines, of thinking that sacking the Boss and installing a New Boss would turn things around. But, any year now ...

When you want to write a big old piece about Something Important, it’s not a bad idea for a blogger to rip out a little piece about it in the meantime, in a single figure number of minutes. That at least gets the meme out there and gives it a chance to propagate, even if a bigger piece at Samizdata would do that better.

The “Apple Daily” is the most popular newspaper here in Taiwan. In recent months the opposition party (and various left-wing groups) have been fretting about the purchase of the Apple Daily (as part of the “Next Media” group) by a tycoon with strong pro-China views. The concern is that he will stop investigatory journalism that embarasses the KMT or the Chinese, and this is likely true. However, it might well be the case that he will continue to allow the Apple Daily to publish stories like this, stories which indicate that socialized/nationalized industries are… crap, basically. Just only if they happen in other countries - especially western countries, and especially Britain and the U.S. The opposition movement (largely socialist) won’t like that either, I suspect.